1. Exceptional Service in the National Interest
Operated for the U.S. Department of Energy’s
National Nuclear Security Administration
by Sandia Corporation
P.O. Box 5800
Albuquerque, NM 87185-0101
William C. McLendon III
Senior Member of the Technical Staff
2016-08-23
Dear: Sir or Madam
Subject: Recommendation Letter for Derek Gorthy
Derek Gorthy worked in my department at Sandia National Laboratories during the summer of
2016.
I was his mentor / supervisor during this time and developed a very strong appreciation for his
skills in software development and time management.
Derek rapidly understood our software project and learned the tools that we use in our process.
He consistently impressed us in his ability to provide high quality code with faster turnaround
times on assigned tasks than we anticipated.
His primary duties were to expand our regression test suite to include significantly more test
cases involving geospatial-temporal semantic graph construction and search. These new tests
were a considerable extension of our automated testing procedures, and will result in time
savings for developers by identifying bugs sooner than they would have prior to Derek’s
additions. He also added numerous improvements to the set of scripts we use to run our graph
construction and search applications, reducing the work needed to generate new experiments and
analyze their results.
In addition to his technical abilities, Derek is also a joy to work with on a personal level. He is
easy going and fit in well with our team from the first day he arrived.
Sincerely,
William McLendon III
Senior Member of the Technical Staff
Data Driven & Neural Computing
Sandia National Laboratories
wcmclen@sandia.gov
(505)845-8397